“Now the goal of our instruction is love that comes from a pure heart, a good conscience, and a sincere faith. Some have departed from these and turned aside to fruitless discussion.”
Before we move on to these verses, let’s take a quick look back on verse 3. Paul tells Timothy that he is to remain in Ephesus so that he “may instruct certain people not to teach false doctrine…” Remember, Paul will have a lot to say about false teachers in his letter to Timothy. But here in verse 4, he takes a minute to remind him what the goal of their instruction is to be. He names three things: a pure heart, a good conscience, and a sincere faith. And they are all done in love. Because love is the most important, let’s start there.
Paul wrote the letter to the church at Corinth about ten years before he wrote this letter to Timothy. This church was experiencing division, immorality, and the misuse of spiritual gifts. The chapter that most of us know from this book is chapter 13, commonly referred to as the “love chapter.” Paul writes in verse 3, “And if I give away all my possessions, and if I give over my body in order to boast but do not have love, I gain nothing.” He ends with this. “Now these three remain: faith, hope, and love—but the greatest of these is love” (v. 13). It makes perfect sense for Paul to start here with “the goal of our instruction is love…” That should be our goal in whatever we do. But we must remember that it is love as God defines it, not love as the world defines it.
Paul says that this love comes from a pure heart, a good conscience, and a sincere faith. John Barry writes in his commentary, “Each member of this beautiful trio speaks of a purity and integrity which produces the most exquisite kind of selfless love, seen in its ultimate form in God’s love itself.”
Paul starts with a pure heart. Peter writes this in his first letter. “Since you have purified yourselves by your obedience to the truth, so that you show sincere brotherly love for each other, from a pure heart love one another constantly…” (1 Peter 1:22). How do we maintain a pure heart? By remaining obedient to the truth. We read this in Psalm 24:3-4. “Who may ascend the mountain of the Lord? Who may stand in his holy place? The one who has clean hands and a pure heart, who has not appealed to what is false, and who has not sworn deceitfully.” Today we live in a world where wrong is declared right and sin is called good. We must not be afraid to tell the truth and call out evil for what it really is.
Next Paul mentions a good conscience. This word comes from a Greek word “to know.” The online dictionary describes your conscience as “the inner sense of what is right or wrong in one’s conduct or motives, impelling one toward right action.” Conscience is an important concept to Paul: he uses this word twenty-one times in his letters. He uses it six times in his Pastoral Epistles. He uses it again later in this chapter. “Timothy, my son, I am giving you this instruction in keeping with the prophecies previously made about you, so that by recalling them you may fight the good fight, having faith and a good conscience, which some have rejected and have shipwrecked the faith” (vv. 18-19). Paul warns here and in other places that it is possible to skew one’s conscience so that you are not able to tell what is right or wrong. “To the pure, everything is pure, but to those who are defiled and unbelieving nothing is pure; in fact, both their mind and conscience are defiled” (Titus 1:15). Indeed this is where we are today. The world calls sin good, and good, evil.
Lastly, Paul writes, “a sincere faith.” In Paul’s second letter to Timothy, he will mention Timothy’s sincere faith. “I recall your sincere faith that first lived in your grandmother Lois and in your mother Eunice and now, I am convinced, is in you also” (1:5). What is faith? Gotquestions.org describes it this way. “Faith in God is trust in Him, based on a true understanding of who He is, as revealed in the Bible. Faith in God involves an intellectual assent to the facts concerning God and a life changing reliance on those facts.” Paul writes in Ephesians, “For you are saved by grace through faith, and this is not from yourselves; it is God’s gift— not from works, so that no one can boast” (2:8-9). Nothing we can do will save us it- is God’s grace- and our faith in Him. This leads us to our next verse.
“Some have departed and turned aside to fruitless discussion.” This was a theme in so many of Paul’s letters! Just as he reminded the Ephesians that we are saved by grace, he had to tell Timothy to remind the church again to be warned against anyone who would teach them anything that differed from this message. The false doctrine and fruitless discussion that Paul is warning against here is the misuse of Old Testament Law. Because the early church had so many recent converts from Judaism who practiced the Old Testament laws, and Gentile converts, there were a lot of false teachings creeping into the Church. Many were confused about whether they were supposed to follow these laws or not. Paul addressed this in his letter to the church at Galatia. I can only imagine their relief when they read, “For freedom, Christ set us free. Stand firm, then, and don’t submit again to a yoke of slavery” (Galatians 5:1).
Yet we still fall for this today. Whether it is having to follow all of the feast days and Old Testament rules of the Hebrew Roots movement, or the dress codes of the Patriarchal and some Pentecostal denominations, we create artificial rules by which we get “closer to God.” Warren Wiersbe writes in his Bible exposition commentary, “these false teachers did not understand the content or the purpose of God’s law… the flesh (our old nature) loves religious legalism because rules and regulations enable a person to appear holy without really having to change his heart.”
My challenge to you is this. Are you doing things to appear holy? Do you have man-made rules that you are following that have the appearance of godliness, but are just legalistic? Or, on the opposite extreme, are you looking at the world through a skewed conscience? (Titus 1:15) Do you need to realign your values with God’s values? I am praying as you go through Timothy with me that you will be challenged as I am.
Grace be with you!
Abundant Joy 